A Field Guide to Scandinavian Literary Birdbrains

If you’re looking for a place with a high concentration of literary eminences who can be counted on to spout incredibly fatuous political clichés in a consistently self-regarding tone, pack your mukluks and set sail for the frozen North.

Every major Western country has one or two of them. I’m speaking of world-class literary cranks — those high-profile, brand-name authors who, when not banging out novels or collecting Nobel Prizes, keep themselves busy smugly pontificating about the evils of America and Israel, tearing down capitalism and Western freedom, and celebrating totalitarians (who, if put in charge of the countries in which these writers live, would either imprison or execute them).

Until recently, for example, Britain had Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, who in the years before his death in 2008 compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany and championed “solidarity” with the PLO and Castro. Germany still has its own aging Nobelist Günter Grass, who in 2006, after a lifetime of insufferable, self-satisfied moral lecturing from a consistently far-left, anti-American perspective, finally got around to admitting that in his youth he’d been a member of the Waffen SS. Until last year Portugal had José Saramago, a lifelong, unrepentant Communist who likened Israel to Nazi Germany — and who, yep, also bagged a Nobel.

When Saramago died, David Frum, in a National Post article headlined “Death of a Jew-Hater,” quoted from a piece the novelist had written for El País:

“[C]ontaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God … the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.”

And hey, let’s not forget America’s own Gore Vidal, whose rants against all things American have grown more bitter and wacky with each passing year — at least in part, one suspects, a product of Vidal’s frustration over never having gotten that phone call from the Swedish Academy.

But not all famous writers are fools (though it may sometimes seem otherwise), and in fact cranks on the truly impressive level of a Pinter, Grass, Saramago, or Vidal don’t grow on trees (though it may sometimes seem otherwise).

Except, that is, in Scandinavia. If you’re looking for a place with a remarkably high concentration of literary eminences who can be counted on to spout incredibly fatuous political clichés in a consistently self-regarding tone (though heaven knows why, aside from sheer masochism, you’d be looking for such a place), pack your mukluks and set sail for the frozen North. For the fact is that an extraordinary percentage of this region’s most honored and bestselling writers harbor an ardent, palpable, quivering contempt for America and Israel, and express it in a language that’s breathtaking for its utter lack of moderation, nuance, or restraint (or, for that matter, originality).

Take, for example, Jostein Gaarder, author of the international bestseller Sophie’s World, who — as I noted here at PJM recentlyin a piece about Norwegian anti-Semitism — won new fans with a 2006 Aftenposten op-ed. Writing in the royal “we,” Gaarder took it upon himself to consign Israel to the dustbin of history: “We no longer recognize the state of Israel….The state of Israel in its current form is history. We don’t believe in the idea of God’s chosen people….To present oneself as God’s chosen people is not just stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.” (This is, by the way, a popular trope among Gaarder and his repellent ilk: framing one’s own racism as an accusation of racism.)

“There are limits to our patience,” preached Gaarder, “and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as a justification for occupation and apartheid. We have placed the Middle Ages behind us. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of the flora, the fauna, and the galaxies has chosen a certain people as his favorites and given them funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.” (In the Norwegian original, those last three words are in English.)

Of course Gaarder’s fantasy of a nation run by fanatical biblical literalists is just that: a fantasy, and a bilious one at that, with no connection whatsoever to the reality of contemporary Israeli society or the to the calculus of Israeli defense. (Indeed, Gaarder’s feverish fulminations about medieval belief systems and Master Race ideology would be far more legitimate if directed at Hezbollah, Hamas, or any one of a number of other groups and governments in the Mideast that would quash Israel like a bug if they could.) Yet despicable though Gaarder’s essay was, many of his literary colleagues were quick to hop onto his bandwagon. Renowned novelist and crime author Jon Michelet, who has played a leading role in Norway’s Communist movement, and top-seeded Norwegian intellectual Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who in addition to being a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo is also a ubiquitous TV talking head and critic of “Islamophobia,” supported Gaarder enthusiastically, as did beloved children’s book author Anne B. Ragde (“a very, very good and wise op-ed”) and popular novelist-playwright Edvard Hoem (“Gaarder is doing his intellectual duty, and he’s doing it better than anyone else”).

Then there’s the Swedish writer Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander mystery novels are international bestsellers — and who is a classic anti-Semite and “useful idiot” of the first water. In a time when Jews are being driven out of Sweden by hate-crime-committing Muslims whom the authorities are too pusillanimous to punish, Mankell — a crime writer, mind you — averts his gaze, fastening it instead on Israeli Jews’ purported offenses against Arabs. In 2009, after attending a “Palestinian literary festival” (!), Mankell painted Israelis in Aftonbladet as vicious, rancorous Palestinian-haters while claiming that he had come across absolutely no evidence of anti-Jewish feeling among the Palestinians he’d met. (The systematic poisoning of Palestinian children with lies about Jews is an amply substantiated reality, but in such matters Mankell and his ilk prefer to disseminate propaganda rather than face the plain and simple facts.) Mankell described Israel as an apartheid state and made it clear that he welcomed its fall.

Then, last year, he took in that convoy of Hamas “aid” vessels that headed from Turkey toward Gaza, and after his detention and release by Israeli authorities he claimed to be weighing the option of denying the citizens of that rogue state the joy of reading his potboilers: “I am a best-selling author in Israel and I must consider seriously whether I should block my books from being translated to Hebrew,” Mankell told Dagens Nyheter. The question, of course, is why any self-respecting Israeli publisher would want to have anything to do with this pal of terrorists.

Mankell’s countryman Jan Guillou — author of the Coq Rouge series of spy yarns and a trilogy about the Crusades — agrees with him that Israel is an apartheid state and, like him, looks forward to its demise. A longtime member of Maoist groups who has written glowingly of Saddam Hussein, Guillou walked out of the Gothenburg Book Fair rather than participate in a three-minute silence in memory of the victims of 9/11, explaining that 9/11 was not “an attack on us all” but rather “an attack on U.S. imperialism” that was justified because “the U.S. is the great mass murderer of our time.” (I do not know how Guillou explained later Islamist attacks on London, Madrid, and other non-American targets.) It didn’t come as much of a surprise when, in 2009, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that the famed spy novelist had himself once been a paid Soviet agent — a revelation that shows no signs, by the way, of having dented Guillou’s popularity in the slightest.

Let’s not forget Denmark. Just the other day, Danish novelist Jens Høvsgaard gave an interview to Dagbladet about his new crime novel, The Seventh Day. In Scandinavia today, rates of rape, assault, and other violent crimes are on the rise; the perpetrators are disproportionately young Muslim men, and the victims are almost always non-Muslim. Høvsgaard, like other Scandinavian crime writers, neatly flips reality around: in The Seventh Day, the villains are evangelical Christians and the victims are Muslims.

Høvsgaard told Dagbladet that he’s concerned about the dangerous new brew in Western society of extreme religiosity and right-wing politics; needless to say, he doesn’t mean the growth of fanatical, fascistic, patriarchal Islam. No, his type can only see Muslims as good guys; as for the bad guys, Høvsgaard invites his interviewer to “[l]ook at the Tea Party movement in the U.S., for example: Christians of a very racist bent. The groups have the same agenda — they’re against gays, Muslims, and Africans.” (Not only is Høvsgaard either ignorant of or dishonest about the Tea Party agenda; he also appears not to have had time to look into the position of Islam on homosexuality.) Høvsgaard further claims that today’s Danish Muslims are in the same position that Danish Jews were in between the world wars. Yes, who can forget those trouble-making Danish Jews who, back in the 1930s, sponged off the state, taught their kids to despise secular Western democracy, and protested newspaper cartoons by rioting violently, burning Danish flags, and plotting the murder of journalists?

It’s a close contest, but perhaps he most despicable member of this pantheon is Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, who is generally viewed as one of his nation’s most distinguished living cultural figures. In 2008, Solstad published an essay in the literary journal Samtiden entitled “On Freedom of Expression,” which was intended, and received, as a major statement by a leading writer about a vitally important topic. It began with the following self-absorbed sentences:

One would think that a left-leaning, oppositional author would be among the most stubborn defenders of freedom of expression in his own country….But that’s not true in my case.

I take a completely indifferent posture toward freedom of expression, as one naturally does toward truisms, and I cannot envision a future in which a situation will arise in which I will be denied the right to express myself.

Far from being threatened, Solstad says, free speech is now being used “as a weapon directed against everything I stand for.” He is referring, of course, to the criticism of Islam by (among others) Danish cartoonists. In Solstad’s view, some expression is simply not worth defending — on the contrary, it deserves to be silenced.

Solstad also argues that, whatever you or I may think, free speech isn’t really all that necessary for the creation and preservation of great books. After all, he notes, his own personal library is crowded with historically significant books, some of them written hundreds of years ago, that people in power never managed to destroy. How did this happen? Solstad writes as if the preservation of these books is the result of some magical, mysterious sociocultural alchemy beyond his comprehension. He doesn’t mention that the Nazis, for example — to name the most recent pack of book-burners to hold power in Norway — were prevented from completing their program of destruction by armed men who risked their lives to bring down Hitler’s tyranny. Nor does Solstad mention the censorship in Communist Eastern Europe of writers like Havel and the imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag of writers like Solzhenitsyn. His attitude seems to be that if you just wait long enough, oppression will disappear, and long-suppressed great books will resurface. It’s a characteristically Scandinavian posture — passive, fatalistic, phlegmatic. Let others fight the battles; better to be peaceable than to fight for freedom.

Or perhaps it’s more correct to describe Solstad’s position as Stalinist. For like many members of the Norwegian cultural elite, Solstad was a longtime member of AKP (m-l), a now-defunct Maoist party. As if to quell any doubts about his current politics, he provided the following reassurance in another 2008 essay: “I say it quite openly: I’m proud. I stand tall. I’m a communist once more.” I quote from the official translation; in the original Norwegian this passage began “I dare say it openly.” That dare is hilarious — for a Norwegian author to “dare” to be a Communist is like a member of NOW “daring” to support abortion rights.

I’ll close with a brief mention of a Swedish writer whose books, in the last couple of years, have sold more copies around the world than those of any of his colleagues, Scandinavian or otherwise. The publication of Stieg Larsson’s giant bestsellersThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest came after years of intense involvement in Swedish Communist politics: Larsson was an active member of the Communist Workers’ League, the founder of the “anti-racist” group Expo, and the editor of its eponymous journal. Alas, Larsson died in 2004, and his novels were published posthumously — so that if we want to know what sorts of tirades he’d be delivering today if he’d survived to enjoy his international acclaim, we need to look back at the stuff he wrote years ago.

Fortunately, some of Larssen’s essays for Expo are available at its website. They’re works of blatant far-left propaganda. To be sure, he pays intense critical attention to anti-Semitism and terrorism; yet his focus, at least in the essays that have been posted, is exclusively on right-wing European anti-Semitism and terrorism, which are, after all, perfect grist for his propaganda mill. It’s telling that when the topic of Islam surfaces in one essay, we find Larssen not criticizing Islamic anti-Semitism or terrorism, but, rather, censuring his fellow Swedes for expressing concern about Islam — which he attributes, in familiar fashion, to racism and far-right nationalism.

It seems not unlikely, then, that had Larsson lived, he’d have been out there bloviating with the best of them. Not, of course, that Scandinavia’s many-throated chorus of PC literati needed another voice.

Yes, good piece. I’ve read two of the Girl Who books, thought them overblown and the popularity frankly a mystery. I will say that most actresses in Hollywood are probably willing to do most anything to play the title character: Lizbeth Salander is a combination of Rain Man and one of those Goth Superheroine chicks in the comic-book-turned-movies all the kids love. Whichever actress lands the role will be set for a good 3-4 years, at least.

Never read Wallander, considered trying him, not so sure now. I used to read Sjovall and Wahloo, never doubted that they were at least socialists, but they died years ago, and the books were more or less good on their own merits.

It’s hard to make sense of these quotes since it seems to describe muslims to a tee but then they say the muslims are different.

If you change ‘funny stone tablets’ to ‘magic meteors’ and ‘burning bushes’ to ‘flying mules’ but leave in the ‘license to kill’ then you’re practically defining Sayd Qutb and Islam.

So why would they say Qutb was a racist? I myself don’t see him as a racist so much as a retarded moron but then words don’t really have any meaning to liberals do they? They treat words like cattle you lasso and wrangle in a corral and then brand.

Funny that they actually make a living with words. Something doesn’t add up – might be a brain cell thing.

A minor quibble: Qutb was pretty racist. If I’m remembering correctly, his comments (perhaps I’m mistaken and they are the comments of some of his followers, nevertheless) about Blacks and Jews, what they are and how they should be dealt with, are pretty much as racist as it gets (in fact, I’ve heard KKK and Stormfront goons who came off sounding much kinder in their treatments of both Blacks and Jews…yikes).

Yes it’s insane. And the worse things get for Israel, the greater the anti-Semitic animus of these radical Leftists. These people live in a parallel universe.

On a very closely related subject, my new blog (online only this month) will be exposing base and extreme anti-Semitism in the science fiction genre community and I mean among writers, editors (I wouldn’t waste my time on the fans). I have similar tales to tell re a number of SF writers (some very prominent and highly regarded, award winning writers) as Bawer does, with all the evidence for what I claim. I am talking Guillou and Saramago levels of Jew-hatred, sometimes worse! There will be major revelations and exposés at my blog over the coming months. My worldview is very middle-of-the-road. See my ‘what this blog is about’ page for where I am coming from. In fact my outlook is very similar to Bawer’s (I’m a big admirer of Bawer’s), in some respects considerably to the left of Pajamas Media (at least on social and economic issues). No I am no dhimmi. I am a pro-Israel Zionist Jew, God forbid, so I am pretty much a parriah in the SF genre community overrun by the same mindlessness, moral and cultural relativism and worse as the non-genre literary world. Despite the presence of many Jews (authentic and/or JINOs) in the genre community (as writers, editors etc) don’t think I have their even guarded support at all (in fairness they don’t know anything about me really, and fear I am an unknown quantity, a loose cannon), I certainly don’t. Yet I wouldn’t let them off so easily and I’m not going to..

I am in the middle of publishing a major exposé (first four parts published) on Holocaust Revisionism within the genre community (and I inadvertently brought it out of the woodwork)! Yes hardcore stuff, this time coming from a conservative (an editor of a SF critical review magazine) that nobody else has had anything to say about at all! And he outed himself nine months ago. Yes I present all the unambiguous evidence for this, I would never risk libel. If you are Jewish (even if you have no interest in SF) you will want to check this out because I really don’t think there is any precedent for this kind of thing, for what went down on a now defunct major SF forum popular with genre personalities as well.. It is so chilling that it actually beggars belief.https://seasonoftheredwolf.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/introduction-to-11-part-series-asimovs-forum-der-sturmer-can-you-tell-the-difference-on-the-banality-of-holocaust-revisionism/

So please to those of you (Jewish or not) who are pro-Israel and interested in science fiction (or just like to keep tabs on anti-Semitism and its modern dynamics and its banality, you don’t have to really care for SF), you have to bookmark my blog and spread the word. This is a major effort on my part and taking up so much of my time, as all serious bloggers know, it’s hard work and you wonder if it’s worth it. Note I will be exposing obscene, eye-popping anti-Semitism among genre writers, editors (predominantly liberal) and associated hypocrisies. Yes I registered my blog with JRants (only today).

If you have friends, family interested in SF/imaginative fiction or contacts in the genre field, please spread the word..

It appears to me that it is really dangerous for Israel to have Arabs with permanent residence inside Israel. I fear it is going to seriously bite Israel in the ass later. Is there really no way of getting them out entirely? Or at least make sure no new ones get in? I have read several places that it’s no problem, that the Arabs will just never get citizenship, no worries. Well I’m worried. It seems Israel has two options: 1. Be destroyed or 2. Be smeared as an apartheid/racist country.

I believe these socialist activist writers from Scandinavia is a sign of things to come. Activist types don’t care about realities or being pragmatic. They don’t grasp how truly insane Muslim fanatics are. The apartheid accusation could eventually stick in the left wing MSM. And the really bad anti-Semites could use it as an excuse for their vitriol.

It’s easy for Scandinavian scum like this to take pot shots at democracies like Israel and the United States. But I would like to see them make the same comments about how Iran murdered people in their own streets after their elections in 2009 or how Assad, right now, is gunning down people who simply disagree with him. These “writers” are the ultimate cowards, spewing out their hatred for countries they know will do nothing in response to their comments. But I’d really like to see if they have the stones to go on their own personal jihad against a country like Iran, which tends to send out hit squads against writers they disagree with around the world, like Salman Rushdie. What a bunch of spineless worms they are.

Why is Finland different when it comes to Israel? I know that their language is completely different, so you can’t understand it, but perhaps you can shed some light as to why Scandinavia’s non-Nordic country is not so anti-Semitic?

I find the word castrati much more discriptive, neutered beings with little interest in long term survival. Since after all, these featherbrains exist purely for their own gratification, and not the providers to hearth and kin…

I can see the apathy (if not agree with), to western survival. they have no vested interest in it. But the open hostility to people who haven’t done anything to them personally?

Uniquely American I guess, we really don’t understand what motivates a hatred irrational on it’s face. Why hate a people who have done so much good, and been persecuted for it?

I think most Americans admire the Jewish people, they’re survivors against all odds, and we have been there once or twice ourselves. The friendship would seem as natural as breathing, why the rest of the world, and some unthinking among us persist in hating…

it’s a very old world thing,. thankfully, most of us Americans seem immune to.

Just who are ‘most americans’ anyway? I fear we are become about what you see if you walk around any given Walmart. The Left have destroyed our educational institutions and our kids are largely a bunch of materialist slobs raised by largely ignorant parents of the same ilk.

We live in a depleted society in the throws of slow-motion suicide. Orwell, C.S. Lewis, even Huxley saw the gathering darkness so many decades ago and it has reached critical mass. We are ready to meet our antichrist.

I see you understood what Scott meant as did I and probably everyone else who read his post. I suggest you reread the article being discussed and insert your name for those discussed in the article. Your post added nothing to the discourse, while being insufferable!

“…a very old world thing,. thankfully, most of us Americans seem immune to.”

Not so. Knee-jerk liberal Americans (that’s most Americans) are the new reactionaries who, like old worlders who lost their political and institutional moorings in the great Socialist experiments, oppose for the sake of opposing, replay the 1960s replaying the 1930s . . .

Don’t be so quick to pat Americans on the back. We have more than our fair share of Israel-haters/Muslim apologists littering our campuses and socio-cultural-intellectual circles. We also have some basic, down home racists as well (and the link between the two, other than their racism and xenophobia for anyone outside of their “tribe” is that they both seem to fancy socialism — ironic).

Every society has them; no society is completely pure in regards to them — the difference is: do they have such a foothold, do they posses the numbers, to drive all public opinion? Most people (in every country) are pretty much “Wal-Mart shoppers” or would be if given the opportunity — that isn’t completely unencouraging, because it tells me that the majority of the human race, if allowed to, would be pretty much live and let live most of the time. But, that is not the case. Throw in discontent, fear…and you wind up with the herd being a bit angry and ready to look for somebody to blame…that’s where our not-so-charming group of crackpots up above come into play (and in fairness there are some right wing cranks too…they also seek power and the heavy hand of judgement over people, they just espouse different end goals — they can’t be allowed to grow in significant numbers either).

Thank you for a fine piece, Mr. Bawer!!! Norway has after WWII been ruled for decades by the Norwegian so called “Social Democratic Party”. This party is a member of the International Socialist Movement. I am myself a Norwegian and have experienced the Left’s brainwashing on the society for 60 years. Through education system and Norwegian Broadcasting Company (which had monopoly untill a couple of decades ago)their political and ideological agenda has been progressively pushed and succeeded up till now. People and academics (and writers) with the not correctly political view have either been silenced to death or stamped as “rightists”.
To meet oposition in arguments have never been the Lefts “style”.
It has for many years been embarassing for me to say that I am Norwegian.
I cannot respect the self-glorifying view of the politics they lead in Norway and unfortunately which also affects their view towards US and Israel. Norway has the oil and gas (which the AMERICANS where the only at that time (beginning ’80s) who could take it up for them. The Left has done a great job for themselves in undermining the Judeo-Christian traditions in Norway (and Scandinavien). We must pray for Norway!

Please add smug. I lived in Sweden many years. They are great people as long as you don’t disturb their certainties under which lie no fundamental precepts. Those were ripped away in the great nihilistic storm of their 1930s’ socialist revolution.

Swedes “know” that they are “best”, that anything non-Swedish is inferior They also know that they should not show that they know it. So they quibble with the superiority of anything Swedish, since because they are “best”, they want to be seen as polite and modest. That’s SMUG, not phlegmatic.

Each Swede lives in the best of all worlds, Sweden where everything is ‘best’, and within their own skins where they “know” how much ‘better’ everything really should be. They have a national narcissism complex that acts precisely like nationalism, a thing they pretend to abhor. Swedes, when drunk, admit to the phrase “scratch a Swede, find a Nazi”.

So why the knee-jerk anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, etc.? Simple.

Swedes must prove daily they are better, “best”, by reflexively championing what their nearest rivals’ loathe.

In a manner of speaking it’s rather amusing to see the ignorance displayed by Larsson withbut, rather, censuring his fellow Swedes for expressing concern about Islam — which he attributes, in familiar fashion, to racism and far-right nationalism.
as that “far right” nationalist socialist state of Germany had a very good relationship with Islam through the Haj Amin al-Husseini, who became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and who did everything possible to kill Jews in Europe (Muslim SS division in the Balkans) and Middle East.
Maybe if he was still alive he could give us his explanation of why Putin, for example, gets along so well with the Muslim extremist states even so far as to getting a pass on slaughtering Muslims, in Chechnya, like Saddam and Hafez al Assad et al did in their countries.

Perusing the first of Larsson’s books I noticed that he mentioned the violence against women in the form of rapes and beatings etc., as part of the headings of each part of the tale.
e.g.
Part One – 18% of women have at one time been threatened by a man;
Part Two – 46% of women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man;
Part Three – 13% of women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship;
Part Four – 92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violence to the police.

Is this violent behaviour a characteristic of Swedish males, the Muslim influence by 2004, a mixture of the two or just his literary fiction?

Any idea how this, if correct, compares with other societies?
If this is a display of Swedish manhood then maybe one can hypothesize that Swedish literary birdbrains have to project onto a scapegoat to hide their shame?

“Günter Grass, who in 2006, after a lifetime of insufferable, self-satisfied moral lecturing from a consistently far-left, anti-American perspective, finally got around to admitting that in his youth he’d been a member of the Waffen SS.”

Well at least he’s being consistent then. Nazis are on the left wing. They believe in the power of the state over the individual.

Great article Mr. Bawer. There are a lot of those types up here in the Great White North, as well. America is the devil they know and Israel is the little satan. It blinds them to all else. As it is meant to. Socialists, feminists, Islamists and gays make for some mighty strange bedfellows, otherwise.

I live in the San Francisco Bay area, a couple of soviets south of “The City”. One of our local Progressive (neé Public) Broadcasting System stations, KCSM, broadcasts Scandinavian crime programs, Wallender, Irene Huss, and van Veertenen. They seem to be politically correct, especially in terms of the male-female equality dynamic. What has struck me so far, and I’ve seen maybe a dozen or so shows, is the overall mood of the programs and their characters. It seems to me to be a low-key, long-term depressive atmosphere. Even the many seascapes shown seem restrained, controlled, uninviting to say the least. Last evening’s “van Veertenen” episode involved a police detective who beheaded a couple of white males who had so corrupted his beloved daughter that he beheaded them. “Tres courant,” a Frenchman might say.

Finland stands out as a beacon of sanity in the North, while Denmark probably has as many troops in Afghanistan “per capita” as the US. Norway and Sweden, unfortunately, are dominated by leftists of the generation of ’68 in the media and major institutions. One can only hope for a renewal of traditional nordic pragmatism once these losers start getting older and retiring; there are sometimes advantages to early retirement!

To #6. Eric R.
Yes, good question: why-or-why we in Denmark, nearly same population as Finland (around 5 mill. each) have 450,000 muslims and Finns only 45,000… I think the reason is Finland’s history as Tsarist colony till 1917 and the war with the Soviets. Thery don’t harbor many illusions about multi-kulti, having tasted czar’s damp prisons and Stalin’s gulag camps. Though the magic movie Dr. Zhivago was mostly shot in Finland in 1965, it was not permitted to screen in Helsinki untill the eighties – the then PM (later president) Urho Kekkonen bowed to soviet pressure.
Though there is great cultural affinity between the Finns and the rest of Scandinavs (around 10 % of Finland popul. are ethnic Swedes!), they never succumbed to the multi-kulti ideology, their education system (PISA score) is the best, on par w. S. Korea, Shanghai and Hong-Kong! – unlike the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians who produce 70 % students as bona-fide illiterates…

As a fan of the Sagas of Icelanders, I cling to the hope that Icelanders are different. One thing I noticed is that Icelanders usually say what they mean; unlike mainland Scandinavians, most of whom seem afraid to say something that other people might disagree with. (So say what you think right away, and chances are that no Scandinavian will openly disagree with you.)

WRT Dag Solstad: about 5 years ago, at the height of the Cartoon Jihad, I repudiated Voltaire: I decided that I would not lift a finger for the freedom of speech of people who would not fight for MY freedom of speech. That means I could not care less for the freedom of speech of Swedes and Norwegians, and in fact British people as well. Thanks to Mr. Solstad for confirming me in my prejudice.

Nor does Solstad mention the censorship in Communist Eastern Europe of writers like Havel and the imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag of writers like Solzhenitsyn.

While Solzhenitsyn was unquestionably in the Soviet Gulag, it was not for his books. Solzhenitsyn was arrested while a captain of artillery in the Red Army in February 1945; with the rest of the Red Army, he was fighting his way to Berlin. Solzhenitsyn’s crime was to write letters to his best friend that made veiled comparisons between Hitler (“Little Moustache”) and Stalin (“Big Moustache”) that were not favourable to Stalin. The military censor ordered his arrest (and that of his friend) and that started his voyage to the Gulag. So it was a private letter, not a book, that put him afoul of Stalin’s regime.

Solzhenitsyn did make one very brief return to the GUlag as a result of being a writer. When the Soviets had had enough of his anti-Soviet writing in 1974, they decided to deport him so he was arrested and briefly – one or two days – imprisoned in the notorious Lubyanka prison before being put on a flight out of the Soviet Union. That was the only time that he was in custody for being a writer (of books, as opposed to private letters.)

I just wanted to set the record straight lest anyone think that Solzhenitsyn went to the Gulag due to his books. He didn’t publish his first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, until 1961, 8 years after his release from the Gulag.

No reason to worry about what the Scandanavians think, they won’t be around for much longer. Sweden will probably be the first -istan in Europe. Where are Charles Martel or the Graf von Solms when you need them?

Um, sorry but no, we wont. I was out in Rosengård the other day and then I saw in full view what a load of crap this Eurabia business is. People were friendly and smiling and Ivory tower intellectuals like Bruce, warning of the dangers of a place I severly doubt he has actually visited (he got all of the numbers wrong in his book, sweden did not have 10% muslims in 2005, 5% was closer to the truth, though in reality it was probably slightly lower) all seemed pretty irrelevant.

It has taking the world awhile to catch up to the notion that it’s view of “fair minded” Scandinavia is misplaced, but it seems the wake up call has finally come and it is a jarring realization. Norway and Sweden also stand as examples of how completely effective government propoganda machine can be and the importance of critical thought and a privately run media. Bawer’s view is refreshing and it doesn’t surprise that he is ‘utlending’ – a foreigner and an freer thinking American. Very few in Norway have the cajones to swim upstream.